My Christmas Wish: An Apple Laptop!

It was Vivek who first told me about how alluring an Apple computer could be. With a BSD core and a cracking Apple GUI over it, it’s just about the best dev environment for any programmer or designer. And I tend to switch between those roles most of the time. The Mac has so often been advertized as the computer for the upper crust of geeks that now it’s not even a cliche. But I’ll tell you three good reasons why an Apple Mac is going to become a real big player in a few years:

They’ve got a solid OS in there: not as focused on security as OpenBSD perhaps, but a helluva lot better than WinXP.

The GUI is amazing. It’s got most of the things the stripped-down version of Longhorn is promising, and 10.5 looks to be even better.

Apple has switched to Intel. This means that you can dual-boot Windows on your Mac. This is perhaps the understated single-most important factor in this list. Also keep watch on the Intel hypervisor project.

So yeah, that’s my Christmas wish. An Intel Mac Powerbook 17-incher. Good looks + brains. When the size, smell, texture, and yeah, even the taste does matter 😉

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6 Replies to “My Christmas Wish: An Apple Laptop!”

KottayamKunjachan, how much actual hands on experience do you have with Mac OS X?
I was a WIndows user/developer from the beginning. Late last year I completely dumped Windows for Mac OS X.
You say, “Windows works soooo hard to make sure that it satisfies everyone.”
The problem is you can’t satisfy everyone. DLL problems, registry corruption etc… I got tired of doing reinstalls. As you correctly states Mac OS X only has to cater to their own hardware. This means problem free user experience.
Viruses, try writing a virus for OS X. it won’t spread. Why? because whenever it wants to do something evil a box pops up and asks the user to enter their name and password. So you can write a virus for a single machine but it won’t spread. So there is no use writing it. Get it?
The reason dual boot Mac/Win is so important isn’t that others like Linux can or can’t but because when people (like me) get tired of all the Windows BS they will have an option of a solid OS that will still run their Windows software.
Oh yeah, the thing that finally made me dump Windows was the Win XP hardware check. I don’t want to be on a deadline and have to add a hard drive or upgrade a card or cpu and have the OS lock me out. I said that’s the last straw. Bye bye Bill. ^_^

Like you said, Apple serves a niche market whereas Windows works soooo hard to make sure that it satisfies everyone.
Another factor is the proprietary hardware of Apple which makes it so much more easy for their devs to write software which they know will run on only one kind of platform. Windows team goes the extra mile to make sure it works with the millions of combinations of hardware their OS is gonna run.
Security: well Windows has thousands of hackers trying to break it and write malicious software to run on Windows machines, whereas i don’t know anyone who targets Apple machines.
Dual Boot: Linux can do the same, but where is it’s consumer OS market share compared to windows